How an Animal Lawyer Can Help You and Your Dog or Pet!

A transcript of an Interview with Gartner & Associates, Animal Law Specialists

Welcome to our Facebook Live show. We have Gartner & Associates Animal Lawyers, which is great ’cause a lot of our viewers definitely do need lawyers sometimes and they have a lot of questions about animal law. If you could just introduce yourselves and just let us know a little bit about yourself, that would be great.

So my name’s David Samuels. I’m … I work at Gartner & Associates. This is Chris who also works at Gartner & Associates.

Basically, we’re a low firm located in downtown Toronto, and we exclusively deal with animal law related issues, such as we’ll defend dog bites, deal with custody issues, breeder disputes, veterinary malpractice. Anything dog related, we’re involved with. We just here at Woofstock having discussions with animal lovers and informing them about our services and that’s about it, really.

That’s what … I wouldn’t have thought there was a specific field. You know you go to look for a lawyer, you think of all those …

Exactly. Exactly.

I never would have thought there was somebody that I could go talk to for animal law.

It is. And we will deal with, for example, in a divorce, we will deal with the custody side of the pet, so we’ll handle the divorce and then we’ll deal with … we’ll arrange the custody between the people. So we’ll mediate who gets to keep the dog on which days. So similar with children, we’ll do with pets as well.

There is someone to turn to, ’cause I’m a dog walker so we walk dogs who are actually dogs of divorce so we might be next Mom’s Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, but the dog might be at Dad’s Thursday, Friday.

Exactly. Exactly.

So they would be able to reach out to you guys and kind of see how that would work with their dogs.

Absolutely. Exactly. So anything animal related issues, we will deal with from a legal aspect.

Awesome.

Yeah.

And what about dangerous dogs? The city has no … how they deem dangerous dogs. If somebody was bitten by a dog, is that they something they would come to you guys?

Yeah. Absolutely. We actually deal with that. A lot of our clients deal with that. Their dog has an incident with another dog or a person. The city will deem them as dangerous. They’ll come to us and we’ll assess the paperwork that they’ve been assessed with as a dangerous dog owner and we’ll essentially go to court and represent them to try to remove that dangerous dog order. And we’ll explain that there’s greater … like a situation that happened, we’ll defend and get help remove that.

I know the process is hard and if you don’t have a lawyer …

It’s complicated if you don’t know. Exactly. Exactly.

If anybody has gone and they don’t think their dog was dangerous, but it was deemed, they have a second option afterwards.

Exactly. And we’ll help with the initial appeal, the initial appeal process, so we put the paperwork together. We’ll orally appeal and appear in court with them and help them.

Perfect. What are the cases where they come up with a dog or an animal? Is it generally custody fights? Or what is it?

A lot of our clients will be condominium and apartment disputes.

I was going to say. Absolutely.

Yeah. So more and more condos are being built in the GCA and Toronto and a lot of landlords are saying, like statements like your are not allowed or someone who has a pet, all of a sudden your pet is not allowed in the building, so we’ll assess their lease agreements and we’ll go head to head with the condo board, and we’ll fight for the dog. We have a great track record, actually. So we’ll assess the contracts very … we’re a trained law firm that deals with the contracts, so we just meticulously go through it, and it’s all included in our process. Yes.

So happy that we met you today because I lived in a condo before. Had to fight them and those condominium people are such bullies too, and they can kick people out.

Unfortunately, it’s just a lot of people who are uninformed to leave with their pets. It’s a really terrible thing. It’s as simple as us going over the contract and sending a couple of letters to them

Yeah ’cause the condos are getting a bit out of hand.

They are. They are. They are. It’s …

You get charged a fee per month if you owned a dog. I was like, “Seriously. Are you going to start charging the kids who live in the building as well?

Exactly. Exactly.

I like how you threw that in there, for sure. I’m really happy that we saw you because I do have a couple clients that definitely are dealing with this stuff too, with rescues, unfortunately that have been lied to and have proof, so I’m definitely have them call you.

Labor disputes, custody, anything you’ve done….with. Yeah.

Perfect. Thank you so much.

If you could just tell the guys again where they can find you online?

Yeah. So our firm is Gartner & Associates Animal Law. You can find us at animallawyers.ca or find us on Facebook under Gartner & Associates Animal Law.

Perfect.

This has been amazing. I didn’t even know there was such a service available.